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She was dressed in jeans, a purple sweater, and a nylon NOPD windbreaker. Zoot fixed his attention on the clearing sky, tapping his palms on the wheel, whistling quietly.
'What would you like to hear from me first?' she said.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You call my house and ask a seventeen-year-old to provide a boat for you?' she said.
'Believe what you want, Lucinda. I'm not up to an argument tonight.'
'You were willing to bring a minor and civilian into a potentially dangerous situation? With no consultation with anyone else?'
'I couldn't get a boat from Motley. I don't have time to go back to New Iberia. You think it's right Purcel may be out there by himself?'
'I can't quite tell you how angry I am,' she said.
'Then why'd you let him come?'
She didn't answer. I lowered my voice. 'Maybe nobody's out there. Maybe I should have waited for you to come home. Maybe I should have gone back to New Iberia,' I said. 'I did what I thought was best.'
I waited. Her arms were folded across her chest, her hands cupped on her elbows. I looked at Zoot, and he turned over the engines and backed us out of the slip. The wind was cool and damp and smelled of salt and dead gars that had been hit by boat propellers. Lights flickered across the c
louds in the south.
We headed down Bayou St. Denis. It was a beautiful boat, custom-built with teakwood and mahogany panels in the cabin, brightwork that had the soft glow of butter, wide beds down below, sonar, a pump toilet, a small galley, and twin two-hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard engines that could hit fifty knots. When we entered Barataria Bay, Zoot tried to open her up.
'The chop's too heavy. You're going to beat us to death, partner,' I said.
The glass was beaded with the spray off the bow. The moon had broken from behind the clouds, and our wake glistened behind us like a long brown and silver trough. Zoot wore a black knitted cap rolled up on top of his head and chewed on a matchstick. When he eased back on the throttle, I saw the two ignition wires wrapped together and swinging loose at the bottom of the instrument panel.
'What kind of engineering do we have here, Zoot?' I said, raising my finger toward the wires.
'The man out of town right now. He forgot to leave the key where it's always at,' he said.
'I see.'
'That's a fact. He lets me take it all the time. I'll introduce y'all sometime.'
'That's very kind of you.'
I looked down below at Lucinda, who was sitting on a cushioned storage locker with her legs crossed, staring straight ahead. Her nickel-plated .357 revolver glinted in her belt holster. I realized that I had read her wrong.
I walked down the steps and sat on a bunk across from her. I could feel the steady vibration of the bow coursing through the chop.
'You're over the black dude in the motel?' I said.
Her mouth parted slightly.
'It's like anything else. It passes,' I said.
The skin wrinked at the corner of her left eye.
'The first time a guy dealt the play on me, I thought I'd wake up with his face in front of me every day of my life,' I said. 'Then one day it was gone. Poof. Three years later I put another guy down.'
'Why are you doing this?' she said.
'Because this boat's a little warm.'
'It's a little…'
